Effects Of Dialects On The Acquisition Of English Consonants

In Second Language Acquisition (SLA), the influence of L1 transfer is apparent in a number of ways. Scholars believe that the differences between the target and native languages do influence L2 acquisition in two types of effects--negative transfer and positive transfer. Errors in phonetics caused by negative transfer, in particular, cause more difficulties in listening and speaking acquisition.This study aims, on one hand, to explore the effects of Tai’an dialects on the acquisition of English consonants, and on the other hand, to examine to what extent tailor-made phonetics teaching can help improve students’ pronunciation of consonants. Based on the investigation concerning the background phonetics teaching and learning of vocational college students in Taishan Polytechnic where the author is working, three questions were raised:(1) What are the background factors that cause the influence of Tai’an dialects on the pronunciation of English consonants? (2) What are the characteristics of the pronunciation of English consonants with Tai’an dialectal accents and how to correct the errors caused by negative transfer? (3) Will tailor-made phonetics teaching focusing on the differences between target and native languages help students to pronounce English consonants better?The subjects of the background interview were administered among 180 freshmen with 30 from each district of Tai’an. The subjects of the pre-test and training were 12 students with the problems affected by dialects in English consonants (two persons per district) for collecting dialogues speech materials and post-test six students (one person per district) with typical problems from the 12 students above for the consonants analysis.The author used the contrastive method and experimental study of speech sounds to compare the major acoustic characteristics of English consonants with Tai’an accents and those of RP (Received Pronunciation). The resultant speech graphs of RP, and the consonants of pre-test and post-test were contrasted visually to explore the positive effect of comparative teaching methods and intensive training in phonetics acquisition.Instruments used in the study included two interviews for the students and two tests before and after the intensive training experiment. The data collected was analyzed quantitatively and described qualitatively with Praat (sound analysis software).The results of the study revealed that (1) there were seven main reasons why learners were affected by dialects when speaking English in SLA and the main potential problems of consonants influenced by Tai’an dialects; (2) seen from the sound spanning graphs, the problems of Tai’an EFL learners mainly existed in the replacement of some consonants such as the replacement between the fricatives/s/and/ts/, or between/z/and/dz/, etc.; (3) similarly, seen from the graphs of post-test and RP, the subtle and obvious improvement of the same consonants with problems were shown after teaching contrastively and training intensively.According to the analysis of sound experimental results, the author came up with some suggestions on phonetics teaching and learning. Phonetics study should be offered as an independent course in language learning. And the study also supplies a new method of teaching phonetics. In addition, this thesis gives us a new visual mode of research on phonetics by combining the qualitative and qualitative analysis.